Transcription
Well, the internet is full of video lectures and uh podcasts and blogs uh about narcissism. And they mostly think of narcissism as a discrete category or type of personality disorder. So that you might in a psychiatric textbook or a psychoanalytic textbook. You might read a chapter on the obsessional, a chapter on the hysteric, a chapter on the psychotic, on the borderline, etc., and a chapter on the narcissistic disorders.
Uh my argument is that this is fundamentally misleading, mistaken because narcissism is not one type of personality disorder. It is personality. It is in the nature of the human being to be narcissistic. It is existential. We are all narcissists. Some people are minimally, some people are moderately, some people are maximally narcissistic. But there is no human being who is not a narcissist to some degree or another.
We come into the world self involved um some of us learn how to love more than others because we are are loved. We identify with those who love us. We feel a need to give love back, to give love in return for love received. I don't think any of us learn to love very well, although some people do uh find it easier to love and do love more easily than others. The more narcissistic we are, the less able we are to love. The more we are able to love, the less narcissistic we are.
Freud himself pretty much got this right in 1914. He set up the opposition in that essay between narcissism and object love. And it's in that essay where he says we must either learn to love or we must fall ill. And we must fall ill if owing to frustration we cannot love. Well, he nailed it there in 1914. I wish he'd stayed with that. Uh if he had psychoanalysis would be all about overcoming narcissism and psychoanalysis would be all about freeing and enhancing our capacity to love the other.
I mean, first of all, we have to recognize that other people exist and that they are real and that they have feelings and thoughts and beliefs. But that's far from enough. Even a psychopath can do that. That is mere cognitive empathy. Uh I know that you exist. I know that you have feelings. I have ideas about what your feelings are, what your beliefs are. Psychopaths need to be able to do that in order to be able to say to you what you need to hear to open your wallet or your purse or whatever and give them all your money. Uh, satists have to have cognitive empathy. Uh, what would be the point of humiliating you if they couldn't recognize that you are in fact feeling humiliated? What would be the point of hurting you if they couldn't know that you were in pain? To enjoy your pain, to enjoy your humiliation, the satist has to be in empathic contact with you.
Empathy is a matter of cognitive knowing or imagining at least what the other is or may be feeling. This is quite different from sympathy. Sympathy is a whole second step. I know what you're feeling. I know that you're in pain and I care and I would like to relieve your pain. that that that second step is is a step not taken by the psychopath or by the malignantly narcissistic person. He knows how you feel. He just doesn't give a damn. Okay.
Much more is required of us than mere cognitive empathy. We are called, says Freud, to move on to a capacity for object love. Um, unfortunately, he didn't stick with this. He switched to this ridiculous language of mental health and mental illness. Um the the central conflict was increasingly between reason, ego and internalized moral norms, super ego against it the passions of sex and aggression. The opposition became, you know, whether we go with the passions of the id or whether we control ourselves and defend against the passions of the id with ego reason and super ego internalized social norms. that really became the model uh of his ego psychology. So he moved away from that initial conception of the core opposition between our narcissism uh and our what Winnott called the capacity for concern for the other.
What did he mean by narcissism? He did not mean self-love. He meant self-obsession. He meant self-p preoccupation. He meant self encapsulation like prisoners of our own perspective. Prisoner of our own wishes, our own beliefs. But we have the capacity to escape from this prison and open ourselves up to the perspectives of others. Um this is a huge emancipation. It's it's like being open to another world. The world of the other and the others. My god, this person is real. This person looks at the world differently than I do. Well, for one thing, his or her world includes views of me. Uh, he or she may see me very differently than I see myself. I can't see the back of my own head. The other can. Um so would that Freud had stuck with that vision of the 1914 essay psychoanalysis is treating the problem of narcissism.
Every patient who comes to us is a narcissist. They express their narcissism in different ways but they're all narcissistic. Some are severely, some are moderately, some are minimally. The therapeutic process helps them get over themselves, past themselves, helps them transcend themselves toward otherness. And this is a real liberation, a real emancipation. Of course, in saying that, and of course, this is why he stopped talking this way. In saying that psychoanalysis was all about overcoming narcissism in favor of love, Freud was in the same position as the Abrahamic religions, which are the religions of love. And of course, Freud hated religion. Especially Christianity. Um and so he was uncomfortable being in the same ballpark as the religions of love. So he stopped talking this way.
Of course this Freudian um critique of narcissism. It came back with Jacques Lau. I mean famously described his work as a return to Freud and in many ways it was not a return to Freud. Lon's return to Freud was really a return to Lon pretending he's Freud but there is one sense in which it was a return to Freud. Um, the early Lan at least offered like Freud a critique of narcissism. He says the infant is born into egoism. He lor morale the baby feels his body to be in bits and pieces. He's born into fragmentation. It's a whole biological theory in support of this. The theory of neotony or post-natal fetalization. The baby is born premature. Prematurely. This is called the theory of biological prematurity. The baby comes out of the womb halfbaked. The skull is not yet knitted together. Um the baby comes compared to other animal species mostly without instincts. It may have some innate reflexes like the blinking reflex, the sucking reflex, but it doesn't come with uh formed instincts the way some other animal species do. Um so we remain neonates for a considerable time after birth and therefore we are far more open to learning and reliant on learning, social learning. society has to supply uh what in other species is supplied instinctually. We arrive without instincts. We get our orientation from our caretakers from the socialization process to a considerable degree. Um, but L says that the child hates this fragmentation and one day it sees its image in its mirror and identifies with the the mirror image which seems so cohesive when he feels so incohesive and here's this image and he takes the image to be himself and now he's a worshipper of images of course Roman Lan was a Roman Catholic and the Bible says, "Thou shalt not worship graven images." And Lon depicts the the child of the mirror phase as an idoltor, a worshipper of images, namely of his image in the mirror. And of course, by the mirror, he doesn't just mean the literal mirror. means the mirror of the mother's eyes, the mirror held up to us by society. And so we're caught in what Lon calls the imaginary. Um we this is a miscognition. We we take this image to be ourselves. Um we're born into this kind of alienation. uh were born into this narcissism, this preoccupation with the selfimage. So we spend our lives polishing the image, thinking that the image is our self, whereas in fact we're worshiping a dead thing, says L. The image is a dead thing. And you know, we're ignoring our lives. We've turned away from the living subject. our true being. We've turned away from this and we're caught in this idolatrous worship of this dead thing, our image, worshiping our narcissism.
There's this link between narcissism and death. It's interesting that at the end of his life, Freud gave us another duality, aeros and than the life drive and the death drive. And of course he represented the death drive as something natural. Um and I think that was a mistake. I much prefer Eric From's biofilia and necrilia because From makes it clear that while the love of life has a natural foundation like Freud's aeros does, necrilia unlike Freud's death drive the love of death for from is unnatural. It's a perversion. It's a pathology. It is nothing natural. It represents some blockage of the life drive. The life drive has been blocked and people have turned to death. This is a pathological development. But in any case toward at the end Freud was back to to the dualism of aeros than and and uh Lal has a similar duality. There is this worship of a dead thing, namely the specular ego, the image in the mirror, that idolatry. Um, that's death. Um, and so than is also death. So there is a sense in which Freud got to this. But Lon very usefully um supplies this idea of narcissism as a a worshiing of the dead image whereas life is associated with the subject.
And if we were to follow the thought of the great uh American philosopher George Herbert me, uh any self that we know or conceive of, he calls the me. But there's always an eye who is doing the conceiving, who's doing the thinking. This is the eye subject. It's like the photographer who never gets into the picture because he's always taking the picture. The eye is in the now. This is Lan's subject. This is being. This is life. This is the subject. Quite distinct from any concept of the self or any image of the self that we may have. Um, okay. Um, in this sense, Lau is carrying on in the tradition of Freud of 1914, who's conceiving psychoanalysis uh as all about the overcoming of narcissism in favor of love.
What's Laz the early lac formula that the psychoanalytic cure involves acceptance of castration and by castration here he means that no image can ever capture the essence of myself. My essence as as living subject is outside of any image. All images will lack being. All images are partial and incomplete. uh and our preoccupation with images cuts us off from being. So acceptance of castration is the acceptance of the inadequacy and the lack of any image. Um, okay. This this is a critique of narcissism. This is along the lines of Freud's 1914 essay. Okay.
So all of this has been taken up by psychology and psychiatry and psychoanalysis and and fundamentally misunderstood. I mean put into one chapter in in a textbook about personality disorders as if this was one personality disorder among others. No, all part personality disorders involve narcissism. Everything human involves narcissism.
Well, Freud hated religion. It's too bad because the Abrahamic religions contain a wonderful critique of narcissism. They call it sin. This is the essence of sin. The essence of sin is not sexual. The essence of sin is selfcenteredness, selfishness, abandonment of the other, neglect of the other because of a preoccupation with oneself. the essence of sin. The whole of Christianity is really trying to teach us of our need for an ongoing daily hour by hour, minuteby minute struggle against our sinful selfobsession, our turning away from otherness. The New Testament is full of stories of failure of the other. Our failure of the other, our looking away. Um, we we we deny Christ three times before the crows. We look away. We run away. We are unresponsive. irresponsible. That means unable to respond to the other.
Of course, social media make this much worse. I mean to be human has always been to be caught in the imaginary. But in today's world, we're surrounded by images. U there are some young people who um aren't sure that other people are really real. They might be robots, might be AI. Um, so to see that other people exist and that they're real and that they have feelings and then to begin to be able to care. So all of this discussion of narcissism on the internet fundamentally misleading. We need to understand that we are all narcissists. Narcissism is our problem. All psychoanalysis is about the problem of narcissism. All psychoanalysis is devoted to helping us to wake up and realize we are not the center, that other people exist, and that we have some response ability toward the other.
Um, today's world is increasingly sick with irresponsibility. Everything is all about the self. Uh, and this Christopher Lash was writing about the emergence of the culture of narcissism. I think it was 1978 or 1979 when that book was published. It has gotten worse and worse and worse. Um, people increasingly uh have no respect for the law, no concern about due process, attacking things like the Constitution, attacking the courts. Why? Because that administration can't bear for anyone to say no to it. The narcissist can't stand. Can't stand it when people say no to him. He thinks he should constantly have everything he wants. He never has to say no to himself. No one should say no to him. He wants what he wants when he wants it. And there is no higher authority than the self. The self is God. So he's not going to tolerate a Supreme Court saying no or any court saying no to him. We're we're seeing really the logical result of this deification of the cell. I mean, there have always been gangsters. Um, but it it it took American society to put one in the White House. Um, and part of the reason we can't bear to look at him is because much as we hate and disapprove of him, he does in a sense represent ourselves. We're infected with the same disease. It's just that he's consumed by it. We're infected. He's consumed by it. He has embraced it. Many of us are still fighting it within ourselves. Um, some of us still take as our ideal what we see as the one man who was free of this disease. So we ask ourselves, what would he do? He managed to stay on the path of love and righteousness. And uh so we read about him. We and he teaches us what we would be like if we weren't sick with narcissism. Um or we can look at the current occupants of the White House and contrast ourselves, compare ourselves not with what we should be, but to compare ourselves with what we should not be, which he certainly uh displays for us. Okay.